Arguments from perceptual variation challenge the view that colors are objective properties of objects, properties that objects have independent of how they are perceived. This paper attempts, first, to diagnose one central reason why arguments from perceptual variation seem especially challenging for objectivists about color. Second, we offer a response to this challenge, claiming that once we focus on determinate colors rather than the determinables they determine, a response to arguments from perceptual variation becomes (...) apparent. Third, our nominal opponents are relationalist (like Cohen in The red and the real: an essay on color ontology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009) and we will argue that the main argument for rejecting objectivism commits the relationalist to a position that is more radical than the one he would wish to endorse. Fourth, we suggest that insight into which properties could be relational may be found by looking to our best scientific theories. (shrink)

I use an old challenge to motivate a new view. The old challenge is due to variation in our perceptions of secondary qualities. The challenge is to say whose perceptions are accurate. The new view is about how we manage to perceive secondary qualities, and thus manage to perceive them accurately or inaccurately. I call it perceptual structuralism. I first introduce the challenge and point out drawbacks with traditional responses. I spend the rest of the paper motivating and (...) defending a structuralist response. While I focus on color, both the challenge and the view generalize to the other secondary qualities. (shrink)

There is variation in how people perceive colors and other secondary qualities. The challenge of perceptual variation is to say whose perceptions are accurate. A natural and influential response is that, whenever there’s variation in two people’s perceptions, at most one of their perceptions is accurate. I will argue that this leads to an unacceptable kind of ignorance.

The basis of perception is the processing and categorization of perceptual stimuli from the environment. Much progress has been made in the science of perceptual categorization. Yet there is still no consensus on how the brain generates sensory individuals, from sensory input and perceptual categories in memory. This chapter argues that perceptual categorization is highly variable across perceivers due to their use of different perceptual strategies for solving perceptual problems they encounter, and that the (...) perceptual system structurally adjusts to the strategies that are most successful. Despite this variability, the different sensory individuals that result when different perceivers rely on different strategies nonetheless correspond to actual external world objects/features. This view is called 'perceptual pluralism'. (shrink)

There is variation in how people perceive colors and other secondary qualities. The challenge of perceptual variation is to say whose perceptions are accurate. According to Sextus, Protagoras’ response is that all of our perceptions might be accurate. As this response is traditionally developed, it is difficult to explain color illusion and color constancy. This difficulty is due to a widespread assumption called perceptual atomism. This chapter argues that, if we want to develop Protagoras’ response, we (...) need to give up perceptual atomism. It ends with a brief sketch of an alternative called perceptual structuralism. (shrink)

I offer a new objectivist theory of the contents of color language and color experience, intended especially as an account of what normal intersubjective variation in color perception and classification shows about those contents. First I explain an abstract account of the contents of color and other gradable adjectives; on the account, these contents are certain objective properties constituted in part by contextually intended standards of application, which are in turn values in the dimensions of variation associated with (...) the adjectives. Then I propose an explanation of normal variations in linguistic color classification; these are postulated to be effects of differences in intended standards for the color adjectives appearing in the classifying predicates. Next, I consider a potential objection to this explanation, based on the suggestion that contextual content should be more accessible than the explanation predicts. In reply, I point out that contextual content is occasionally opaque to unsophisticated reflection. Finally, I present a companion account of the contents of color experiences on which these represent an object as lying on certain salient intervals in the chromatic dimensions, and I show how the account accommodates intersubjective variation in color perception. (shrink)

In many cases of variation in color vision, there is no non-arbitrary way of choosing between variants. Byrne and Hilbert insist that there is an unknown standard for choosing, while eliminativists claim that all the variants are erroneous. A better response relativizes colors to perceivers, thereby providing a color realism that avoids the need to choose between variants.

To identify the set of reflectances that constitute redness, the authors must first determine which surfaces are red. They do this by relying on widespread agreement among us. However, arguments based on the possible ways in which humans would perceive colors show that mere widespread agreement among us is not a satisfactory way to determine which surfaces are red.

An adequate ontology of color must face the empirical facts about per- ceptual variation. In this paper I begin by reviewing a range of data about perceptual variation, and showing how they tell against color physicalism and motivate color relationalism. Next I consider a series of objections to the argument from perceptual variation, and argue that they are un- persuasive. My conclusion will be that the argument remains a powerful obstacle for color physicalism, and a (...) powerful reason to believe in color relationalism instead. (shrink)

An adequate ontology of color must face the empirical facts about perceptual variation. In this paper I begin by reviewing a range of data about perceptual variation, and showing how they tell against color physicalism and motivate color relationalism. Next I consider a series of objections to the argument from perceptual variation, and argue that they are unpersuasive. My conclusion will be that the argument remains a powerful obstacle for color physicalism, and a powerful (...) reason to believe in color relationalism instead. (shrink)

Significant variations in the way objects appear across different viewing conditions pose a challenge to the view that they have some true, determinate color. This view would seem to require that we break the symmetry between multiple appearances in favor of a single variant. A wide range of philosophical and non-philosophical writers have held that the symmetry can be broken by appealing to daylight viewing conditions—that the appearances of objects in daylight have a stronger, and perhaps unique, claim to reveal (...) their true colors. In this note we argue that, whatever else its merits, this appeal to daylight is not a satisfactory answer to the problem posed by perceptual variation. (shrink)

People have three cognitive representations of the self, namely, the individual, relational, and collective selves, which are indispensable components of selfhood but not necessarily given equal preference. Previous studies found that people displayed varied self-hierarchy in miscellaneous tasks involving different research materials that had pre-existing learned associations established over long periods of time. Therefore, this study tries to explore a purer self-hierarchy without the influence of research materials, using perceptual matching tasks. The behavioral and event-related potentials’ findings showed that (...) people recognized information association with their individual self faster compared with their relational and CS. Smaller N2, stronger P3 and late positive complex amplitudes were evoked during IS compared with RS and CS. However, the three selves evoked equal P2 amplitudes at the early processing stage. Moreover, CS showed a weaker advantage than RS, demonstrating a longer reaction time, lower d prime, and weaker P3 and LPC amplitudes in the parietal region. Overall, self-hierarchy during simple perceptual processing manifested as IS > RS > CS at the late processing stage but manifested as IS = RS = CS at the early processing stage. Self-hierarchy varies according to the processing stage, even without meaningful information and during the simple perception processing. This result provides direct evidence that all selves can be tagged with neutral actions, which would fit the idea of an organism attuned to self-survival at multiple processing levels. (shrink)

Many philosophers have been attracted by the view that colors are mind-independent properties of object surfaces. While this view has come in for a fair bit of criticism for failing to do justice to the facts about perceptual variation, Byrne and Hilbert have recently argued that perceptual variation involving color is no more problematic for physicalism about color than representational variation involving temperature is for physicalism about temperature. Unfortunately, the analogy on which this response rests (...) is no less controversial than the disputed view about color, and so the response leads to a standoff rather than a resolution of the debate. However, we can appeal to facts about our inferential treatment of color and other properties as a way of resolving this impasse; doing so gives us defeasible reason for rejecting the Byrne and Hilbert response, and so for rejecting their mind-independent conception of color. (shrink)

According to Smell Objectivism, the smells we perceive in olfactory experience are objective and independent of perceivers, their experiences, and their perceptual systems. Variations in how things smell to different perceivers or in different contexts raise a challenge to this view. In this paper, I offer an objectivist account of non-illusory contextual variation: cases where the same thing smells different in different contexts of perception and there is no good reason to appeal to misperception. My central example is (...) that of dihydromyrcenol, a substance that can smell both woody and citrusy depending on what other odourants one has recently been exposed to. I first argue that the subjects’ apparently conflicting reports about the way dihydromyrcenol smells are best understood as comparative characterisations of a smell. Given this understanding, different reports can be correctly made in response to perceiving the very same smell. I then argue that the phenomenal difference between the experiences subjects have across contexts can be explained compatibly with Smell Objectivism. On the account proposed, subjects perceive the very same smell but different qualities, notes, or aspects of it are salient to them, depending on the context of perception. I then consider how the proposed defence of Smell Objectivism can be adapted to other cases where the same thing is reported as smelling different in different contexts. (shrink)

Perceptual constancy, often defined as the perception of stable features under changing conditions, goes hand in hand with variation in how things look. A white wall in the orange afternoon sun still looks white, though its whiteness looks different compared with the same wall in the noon sun. Historically, this variation has often been explained in terms of our experience of “merely sensory” or subjective properties – an approach at odds with the fact that the variation (...) does track objective features of the perceptual situation, such as illumination. One approach, becoming more common, is to account for the variation in terms of further “dimensions” to perceptual experience. Especially in colour perception, this is a natural thought to have but the idea is often left vague. In this paper I argue that the “dimensional” strategy has problems of its own, but is useful in drawing out some interesting complications in the way perceptual experience is structured. Specifically, the structure of “constancy spaces” brings out the different ways in which there is stability and instability in the experience of constancy, without the need for novel or merely subjective features. Instability arises in a contingent structural feature of perceptual experience. (shrink)

Colour variation is the fact that what colour physical objects look to have depends on viewing conditions and a perceiver’s visual system. Both Colour Relationalists and Colour Eliminativists regard their analyses of colour variation as central to the justification for their respective views. Yet the analyses are decidedly different. Colour Relationalists assert that most instances of colour variation are veridical and infer from this that colours are relational properties of objects that are partly determined by perceivers. By (...) contrast, Colour Eliminativists assert that colour variation is too unsystematic to ground the claim that many or most instances of colour variation are veridical. From this they infer that objects don’t have colours. I argue that the Eliminativist analysis is superior. On my view, the Relationalist account of veridical colour experience reduces to the assertion that objects have colour simply because they cause perceivers to have colour experiences of them. In this context, I argue, the resulting conception of veridicality is vacuous. More directly, the foundational idea of Eliminativism is the opposite claim: the fact that objects cause perceivers to have colour experiences of them is on its own not sufficient to justify or ground the claim that objects have colour. The Relationalist, I argue, has failed to justify anything stronger than this. In this debate we should thus side with the Eliminativist: objects do not possess colour; they merely cause us to undergo colour experiences. (shrink)

Inter-species variation in colour perception poses a serious problem for the view that colours are mind-independent properties. Given that colour perception varies so drastically across species, which species perceives colours as they really are? In this paper, I argue that all do. Specifically, I argue that members of different species perceive properties that are determinates of different, mutually compatible, determinables. This is an instance of a general selectionist strategy for dealing with cases of perceptual variation. According to (...) selectionist views, objects simultaneously instantiate a plurality of colours, all of them genuinely mind-independent, and subjects select from amongst this plurality which colours they perceive. I contrast selectionist views with relationalist views that deny the mind-independence of colour, and consider some general objections to this strategy. (shrink)

Steels & Belpaeme's (S&B) procedure does not model much of the important variation that occurs across human color categorizers. Human perceptual variation and its corollary consequences impact real-world color categorization. Because of this, investigators with the primary aim of understanding color categorization and naming across cultures should exercise some caution extending these findings to explain how different human societies lexicalize color appearance space.

Speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions and their boundaries are generally fuzzy and ambiguous in part because listeners often give differential weighting to these cue dimensions during phonetic categorization. This study explored how a listener's perception of a speaker's socio-indexical and personality characteristics influences the listener's perceptual cue weighting. In a matched-guise study, three groups of listeners classified a series of gender-neutral /b/-/p/ continua that vary in VOT and F0 at the onset of the following vowel. Listeners (...) were assigned to one of three prompt conditions and rated the talker in terms of vocal gender prototypicality, attractiveness, friendliness, confidence, trustworthiness, and gayness. Male listeners and listeners who saw a male face showed less reliance on VOT compared to listeners in the other conditions. Listeners' visual evaluation of the talker also affected their weighting of VOT and onset F0 cues, although the effects of facial impressions differ depending on the gender of the listener. The results demonstrate that individual differences in perceptual cue weighting are modulated by the listener's gender and his/her subjective evaluation of the talker. These findings lend support for exemplar-based models of speech perception and production where socio-indexical features are encoded as a part of the episodic traces in the listeners' mental lexicon. This study also shed light on the relationship between individual variation in cue weighting and community-level sound change by demonstrating that VOT and onset F0 co-variation in North American English has acquired a certain degree of socio-indexical significance. (shrink)

The universality, invariance, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that have evolved in that universe – provided that the mental principles are formulated with respect to the abstract spaces appropriate for the representation of biologically significant objects and their properties. (1) Positions and motions of objects conserve their shapes in the geometrically fullest and simplest way when represented as points and connecting geodesic paths in the six-dimensional manifold jointly determined by the (...) Euclidean group of three-dimensional space and the symmetry group of each object. (2) Colors of objects attain constancy when represented as points in a three-dimensional vector space in which each variation in natural illumination is canceled by application of its inverse from the three-dimensional linear group of terrestrial transformations of the invariant solar source. (3) Kinds of objects support optimal generalization and categorization when represented, in an evolutionarily-shaped space of possible objects, as connected regions with associated weights determined by Bayesian revision of maximum-entropy priors. Key Words: apparent motion; Bayesian inference; cognition; color constancy; generalization; mental rotation; perception; psychological laws; psychological space; universal laws. (shrink)

Dealing with phonological variations is important for speech processing. This article addresses whether phonological variations introduced by assimilatory processes are compensated for at the pre-lexical or lexical level, and whether the nature of variation and the phonological context influence this process. To this end, Swedish nasal regressive place assimilation was investigated using the mismatch negativity component. In nasal regressive assimilation, the coronal nasal assimilates to the place of articulation of a following segment, most clearly with a velar or labial (...) place of articulation, as in utan mej “without me” > [ʉːtam mɛjː]. In a passive auditory oddball paradigm, 15 Swedish speakers were presented with Swedish phrases with attested and unattested phonological variations and contexts for nasal assimilation. Attested variations – a coronal-to-labial change as in utan “without” > [ʉːtam] – were contrasted with unattested variations – a labial-to-coronal change as in utom “except” > ∗[ʉːtɔn] – in appropriate and inappropriate contexts created by mej “me” [mɛjː] and dej “you” [dɛjː]. Given that the MMN amplitude depends on the degree of variation between two stimuli, the MMN responses were expected to indicate to what extent the distance between variants was tolerated by the perceptual system. Since the MMN response reflects not only low-level acoustic processing but also higher-level linguistic processes, the results were predicted to indicate whether listeners process assimilation at the pre-lexical and lexical levels. The results indicated no significant interactions across variations, suggesting that variations in phonological forms do not incur any cost in lexical retrieval; hence such variation is compensated for at the lexical level. However, since the MMN response reached significance only for a labial-to-coronal change in a labial context and for a coronal-to-labial change in a coronal context, the compensation might have been influenced by the nature of variation and the phonological context. It is therefore concluded that while assimilation is compensated for at the lexical level, there is also some influence from pre-lexical processing. The present results reveal not only signal-based perception of phonological units, but also higher-level lexical processing, and are thus able to reconcile the bottom-up and top-down models of speech processing. (shrink)

The world shows some degree of invariance, and we perceive this invariance despite a lot of variation generated locally by our movements, changes in illumination, and the way in which our sense organs react to stimulation. Generally, philosophy and psychology each explain our perception of invariance through the notion of ‘perceptual constancy’. According to the traditional definition, perceptual constancies are capacities to perceive the objective (i.e., perceiver- and context-independent) local properties of external objects despite variation in (...) the stimulation of sensory organs. In this paper, we argue that the traditional understanding of perceptual constancy should be expanded to include a broader range of phenomena connected to the perception of invariance. Our argument starts from an odd activity: pole balancing. Balancing a pole-shaped object (e.g., a broomstick) on the palm of your hand in order to maintain it in an upright position requires (multimodal) perception and continuous tracking (within a certain range) of a particular kind of global invariant feature in the world. By examining this activity and its connection to the notion of perceptual constancy as it is traditionally understood, we propose an alternative account with the goal of clarifying the relationship between the alleged mechanisms underlying constancy and the philosophical implications of the phenomenon. (shrink)

Vision consists of four essays: “Seeing distance,” “Size,” “Perceptual inference,” and “A Gibsonian alternative?” The continuous thread is the Berkeleian treatment of the perception of spatial properties, particularly in connection with what is and is not “immediately perceived.” The first two essays are closely connected with specific Berkeleian arguments and modern responses to them. The second two essays deal more generally with modern discussions by psychologists of whether visual perception is “direct” or “indirect.” The claims on the cover that (...) the book is “unique in its blend of philosophical and historical perspectives on contemporary issues in vision studies” and that it is “clearly written” and suitable “for an interdisciplinary readership in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, cognitive psychology and history of science” are all entirely justified. (shrink)

Terence Horgan and John Tienson argue that there is phenomenal intentionality, i.e., “a kind of intentionality, pervasive in human mental life, that is constitutively determined by phenomenology alone” (p. 520). However, their arguments are open to two lines of objection. First, Horgan and Tienson are not sufficiently clear as to what kind of content it is that they take to be determined by, or to supervene on, phenomenal character. Second, critics have objected that, for their conclusion to follow, Horgan and (...) Tienson would first have to establish the co-variation of phenomenology and intentional content, but even so, phenomenal intentionality would still emerge as less plausible than its converse, representationalism. I will address these two challenges by appeal to Husserlian ideas. A consideration of perceptual phenomenology (i.e., phenomenal character) shows that there is a kind of perceptual content that is, indeed, determined by phenomenal character. Such content is conceived in terms of fulfillment conditions, or what it takes to bring aspects of objects and scenes to different, and more complete, ways of givenness. We can establish the primacy of phenomenology, relative to such fulfillment-conditional content, by tracing it back to the basic phenomenology of visual and other sensations. (shrink)

This article is composed of three parts. In the first part of the article I take up a question raised by Susanna Siegel (Philosophical Review 115: 355–388, 2006a). Siegel has argued that subjects have the following anticipation: (PC) If S substantially changes her perspective on o, her visual phenomenology will change as a result of this change. She has left it an open question as to whether subjects anticipate a specific kind of change. I take up this question and answer (...) it in the affirmative. By appealing to a widely held view of perceptual content, the view that we represent ‘factual’ properties in perception, I argue that (PC) can be refined as follows: (PC’) If S substantially changes her perspective on o, her visual phenomenology will present different views of o’s factual properties. In the second part of the article I argue that (PC’) implies that there are cases in which normal perceivers have different perceptual content under identical viewing conditions. The differences in perceptual content are due to differences in the determinacy of visual anticipation. I draw the conclusion that perceptual content is rich in the sense that it includes a unique contribution from individual perceivers. In the final part of the article, I discuss some open issues regarding the way in which (PC’) relates to the personal/sub-personal distinction, empirical models, and the distinction between perception and cognition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Human Goodness: Pragmatic Variations on Platonic ThemesCatherine E. MorrisonHuman Goodness: Pragmatic Variations on Platonic Themes by Paul Schollmeier Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. x + 302. $80.00, cloth.This is a book about spirits—human, godly, ghostly, and alcoholic. Paul Schollmeier's Human Goodness: Pragmatic Variations on Platonic Themes explores how humble humans act morally in an absurd world. Schollmeier contends that the Socratic spirit, or daimon, of self-knowledge and (...) hypothesis testing provides the foundation for a deeply human moral philosophy. It is, in Schollmeier's elegant phrasing, daimonic rather than eudaimonic, joining Aristotle and Plato with William James, as well as contributions from the ghosts of David Hume and Immanuel Kant and a few rounds of whiskey. Spirits abound! Mixing Socratic skepticism with Jamesian empiricism, Schollmeier argues that we act best when we apply general principles held as opinion (not as certain knowledge), and tested through experience, to our particular situation. When these opinions yield fruit, we find ourselves less at the whim of our capricious surroundings; when they do not, we are obliged to recognize the provisional nature of our opinions and change them. The ends of these day-to-day activities reflect a far grander cosmological order, one we ignore to our mortal (and moral) peril. It is by engaging in this intellectual activity that we are made happy, and it is in measured pursuit of this happiness that we are virtuous. Our actions are neither absolutely true nor perfect. They are instead the best that we can do. And for a reviewer attempting to encapsulate a finely nuanced book in a small space, this is comforting advice indeed. [End Page 190]The book begins with a puzzle: The curious twin claims in Plato's Apology that, true to the Delphic oracle's proclamation, Socrates is both wise and knows nothing. The key to this apparent paradox, Schollmeier contends, is the difference between divine knowledge, "ultimate, nonhypothetical knowledge of final causes" (6), and human knowledge, which is hypothetical only. Schollmeier marshals William James to argue that as humans, we encounter objects of knowledge perceptually; even our concepts are fashioned from this meager material. Without access to divine knowledge, humans must test hypotheses and assume that they are true only provisionally.James's (and Hume's) emphasis on the passions as the foundation for action, however, gives Schollmeier pause. In order to construct a moral philosophy that avoids absolutism but remains objective, Schollmeier argues for a harmony between the intellectual and the passional that is ultimately rational, our Socratic daimon. We are neither gods nor animals. Should we surrender rationality to desire, Schollmeier warns in concert with Socrates, our already fragile perceptual knowledge will be further distorted by fickle emotion. It is precisely because our grasp on the world is so tenuous that we must pay heed to cool intellect rather than hot passion.Such skepticism of our claim to know might make one hesitant to engage in the enigmatic world—but we have no choice! In order to find our hybrid daimon, both Socratic and pragmatic, Schollmeier suggests rhetoric as the methodology best suited to serving practical knowledge because it eschews certainty in favor of probability and acknowledges that the hypotheses on which we act are tentative and revisable. To this end, Schollmeier highlights the enthymeme and argument by example as the two techniques that best suit the nature of our hypothetical knowledge, and he urges a return to philodoxy, the love of opinion.Giving up our claim to certainty need not be a dismal proposition. Having established his methodology, Schollmeier begins building a moral philosophy that embraces an ontology of change and contends that our happiness provides us with stability in the form of a rational teleology. The objects of our human happiness are fleeting and changeable, so happiness cannot be static but is, rather, an activity that is its own end, "an activity that is an intellectual inquiry" (78). Our happiness is contingent on our ability to hypothetically determine, in our particular setting, our function and then fulfill this role to the best of our abilities. Depending on the setting, it may be dancing, parenting, or simply a lively... (shrink)

Much research on color representation and categorization has assumed that relations among color terms can be proxies for relations among color percepts. We test this assumption by comparing the mapping of color words with color appearances among different observer groups performing cognitive tasks: an invariance of naming task; and triad similarity judgments of color term and color appearance stimuli within and across color categories. Observer subgroups were defined by perceptual phenotype and photopigment opsin genotype analyses. Results suggest that individuals (...) rely on at least two different representational models of color experience: one lexical, conforming to the culture's normative linguistic representation, and another individual perceptual representation organizing each observer's color sensation experiences. Additional observer subgroup analyses suggest that perceptual phenotype variation within a language group may play a greater role in the shared color naming system than previously thought. A reexamination of color naming data in view of these findings may reveal influences on color naming important to current theories. (shrink)

O'Shea concludes that Sellars's attempts to preserve the core truths in Kant's theory of experience and to integrate them with an overall scientific naturalist outlook can and should survive the rejection of several central components of Sellars's proposed adaptation of Kant's transcendental idealism: ABSTRACT: "Sellars’ career-long engagement with Kant’s philosophy involved both readings of Kant and appropriations of Kant that are nuanced, original, and related in complex ways to Sellars’ own philosophical views. In some ways similar to Strawson’s classic reading, (...) Sellars defended Kant’s theory of experience and his analysis of human knowledge as essentially correct. This includes various views on the nature of conceptual cognition, the thinking self, practical reason, perceptual experience, and the lawfulness of nature. On the other hand, and again like Strawson, Sellars regarded Kant’s transcendental idealism as involving a strong ontological commitment to unknowable but thinkable (and non-spatiotemporal) ‘things in themselves’. However, whereas Strawson regarded such a position as deeply incoherent, Sellars argues that Kant’s theological conception of things in themselves can coherently be replaced with a scientific realist conception of things in themselves as theoretically postulated imperceptible processes, which play a structurally similar role for Sellars in grounding the Kantian-phenomenal ‘appearances’ in the ‘manifest image’ of the world. Sellars’ highly complex but sophisticated reading of Kant on sensibility and intuition, when combined with Sellars’ own idiosyncratic views on sensory qualia, render it even more difficult to come to terms with Sellars’ engagements with Kant’s idealism. This chapter attempts to provide a concise presentation and evaluation of certain central themes in Sellars’ complex philosophical dialogue with Kant.". (shrink)

People may exhibit two kinds of modifications when demonstrating action for others: modifications to facilitate bottom‐up, or sensory‐based processing; and modifications to facilitate top‐down, or knowledge‐based processing. The current study examined actors' production of such modifications in action demonstrations for audiences that differed in their capacity for intentional reasoning. Actors' demonstrations of complex actions for a non‐anthropomorphic computer system and for people (adult and toddler) were compared. Evidence was found for greater highlighting of top‐down modifications in the demonstrations for the (...) human audiences versus the computer audience. Conversely, participants highlighted simple perceptual modifications for the computer audience, producing more punctuated and wider ranging motions. This study suggests that people consider differences in their audiences when demonstrating action. (shrink)

What are the factors that contribute to (or inhibit) diachronic sound change? While acoustically motivated sound changes are well documented, research on the articulatory and audiovisual-perceptual aspects of sound change is limited. This paper investigates the interaction of articulatory variation and audiovisual speech perception in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS), a pattern of sound change observed in the Great Lakes region of the United States. We focus specifically on the maintenance of the contrast between the vowels /ɑ/ (...) and /ɔ/, both of which are fronted as a result of the NCVS. We present results from two experiments designed to test how the NCVS is produced and perceived. In the first experiment, we present data from an articulatory and acoustic analysis of the production of fronted /ɑ/ and /ɔ/. We find that some speakers distinguish /ɔ/ from /ɑ/ with a combination of both tongue position and lip rounding, while others do so using either tongue position or lip rounding alone. For speakers who distinguish /ɔ/ from /ɑ/ along only one articulatory dimension, /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ are acoustically more similar than for speakers who produce multiple articulatory distinctions. While all three groups of speakers maintain some degree of acoustic contrast between the vowels, the question is raised as to whether these articulatory strategies differ in their perceptibility. In the perception experiment, we test the hypothesis that visual speech cues play a role in maintaining contrast between the two sounds. The results of this experiment suggest that articulatory configurations in which /ɔ/ is produced with unround lips are perceptually weaker than those in which /ɔ/ is produced with rounding, even though these configurations result in acoustically similar output. We argue that these findings have implications for theories of sound change and variation in at least two respects: 1) visual cues can shape phonological systems through misperception-based sound change, and 2) phonological systems may be optimized not only for auditory but also for visual perceptibility. (shrink)

The sound system of a language must be able to support a perceptual contrast between different words in order to signal communicatively relevant meaning distinctions. In this paper, we use a simple agent-based exemplar model in which the evolution of sound-category systems is understood as a co-evolutionary process, where the range of variation within sound categories is constrained by functional pressure to keep different words perceptually distinct. We show that this model can reproduce several observed effects on the (...) range of sound variation. We argue that phonological systems can be seen as finding a relative optimum of variation: Efficient communication is sustained while at the same time, hidden category variation provides pathways for future evolution. (shrink)

In her paper, ‘Action and Self-location in Perception’, Susanna Schellenberg argues that perceptual experience of an object's intrinsic spatial properties, such as its size and shape, requires a capacity to act. More specifically, Schellenberg argues that, to have a perceptual experience of an object's intrinsic spatial properties, a subject needs to have a certain practical conception of space, or a spatial know-how. That, in turn, requires self-locating representations, which locate the subject, relative to the perceptual object, as (...) a perceiver and an agent, viz., someone who has a capacity for actions. She also makes two objections, viz., the unification objection and the sentient statue objection, to Alva Noë's sensorimotor view, a different account of how perceptual experience depends on actions. I will argue that her objections jointly render problematic not only Noë's but also her own view. (shrink)

The paper presents a number of empirical arguments for the perceptual view of speech comprehension. It then argues that a particular version of phenomenal dogmatism can confer immediate justification upon belief. In combination, these two views can bypass Davidsonian skepticism toward knowledge of meanings. The perceptual view alone, however, can bypass a variation on the Davidsonian argument. One reason Davidson thought meanings were not truly graspable was that he believed meanings were private (unlike behavior). But if the (...) perceptual view of speech comprehension is correct, then meanings (or at least conveyed meanings) are public objects like other perceivable entities. Hence, there is no particular problem of language comprehension, even if meanings originate in “private” mental states. (shrink)

Sceptics vis-à-vis introspection often base their scepticism on ‘phenomenological disputes’, ‘introspective disagreement’, or ‘introspective disputes’ (Kriegel, 2007; Bayne and Spener, 2010; Schwitzgebel, 2011): introspectors massively diverge in their opinions about experiences, and there seems to be no method to resolve these issues. Sceptics take this to show that introspection lacks any epistemic merit. Here, I provide a list of paradigmatic examples, distill necessary and sufficient conditions for IDs, present the sceptical argument encouraged by IDs, and review the two main strategies (...) to reject such a scepticism. However, both types of strategies are unsatisfactory. In order to save introspection from the looming sceptical threat, I advocate a deflationary strategy, based on either an ‘Argument from Perceptual Kinship’ or an ‘Argument from Ownership’. In the end, there cannot be any genuine IDs, for nothing can fulfil the reasonable conditions for IDs. What looks like IDs may instead be indicators of phenomenal variation. Debates that look like IDs may then arise even if introspection were a perfect method to know one’s mind. Thus, scepticism vis-à-vis introspection based on IDs rests on shaky grounds. (shrink)

Humans have the ability to learn surprisingly complicated statistical information in a variety of modalities and situations, often based on relatively little input. These statistical learning (SL) skills appear to underlie many kinds of learning, but despite their ubiquity, we still do not fully understand precisely what SL is and what individual differences on SL tasks reflect. Here, we present experimental work suggesting that at least some individual differences arise from stimulus-specific variation in perceptual fluency: the ability to (...) rapidly or efficiently code and remember the stimuli that SL occurs over. Experiment 1 demonstrates that participants show improved SL when the stimuli are simple and familiar; Experiment 2 shows that this improvement is not evident for simple but unfamiliar stimuli; and Experiment 3 shows that for the same stimuli (Chinese characters), SL is higher for people who are familiar with them (Chinese speakers) than those who are not (English speakers matched on age and education level). Overall, our findings indicate that performance on a standard SL task varies substantially within the same (visual) modality as a function of whether the stimuli involved are familiar or not, independent of stimulus complexity. Moreover, test–retest correlations of performance in an SL task using stimuli of the same level of familiarity (but distinct items) are stronger than correlations across the same task with stimuli of different levels of familiarity. Finally, we demonstrate that SL performance is predicted by an independent measure of stimulus-specific perceptual fluency that contains no SL component at all. Our results suggest that a key component of SL performance may be related to stimulus-specific processing and familiarity. (shrink)

The basic problem of perceptual change is how to account for both variation and constancy in perceiving the world. Is order learned? How deep does plasticity go in that respect? I argue that different kinds of perceptual plasticity have been confused in recent debates, notably between J. Fodor and P. M. Churchland. By focusing on changes in the use of concepts, the issues in the Fodor-Churchland debate can be resolved. Beyond that debate, I propose a generalized encoding (...) approach to perception as a way of accounting for a significant form of perceptual change. (shrink)

We found a direct relationship between variation in informants' grammaticality intuitions about pronoun coreference and variation in the same informants' use of a clause segmentation strategy during sentence perception. It has been proproposed that ‘c‐command’, a structural principle defined in terms of constituent dominance relations, constrains within‐sentence coreference between pronouns and noun antecedents. The relative height of the pronoun and the noun in the phrase structure hierarchy determines whether the c‐command constraint blocks coreference: Coreference is allowed only when (...) the complement structure containing the noun is attached higher than the pronoun. We collected informants' judgments on pronoun‐noun coreference in which the noun antecedent was contained in a complement structure dominated by either the Sentence‐node (S‐node) (higher than the pronoun) or the Verb‐phrase‐node (VP‐node) (not higher than the pronoun). We also assessed each informant's perceptual clause‐closure tendency using an auditory word‐monitor paradigm. Informants who strongly segmented clauses in the perceptual task did not differentiate between an S‐ and VP‐attachment of sentence complements, as revealed in their coreference judgments, but rather appeared to attach all sentence complements to the S‐node. Informants with relatively weak perceptual segmentation differentiated their coreference judgments according to the node attachment of the complement structure. These results indicate that the linguistic universal controlling within‐sentence coreference applies to the perceptually available structure for a sequence, not to its pure linguistic structure. Hence, linguistic intuitions result from the interaction of three independent faculties: language‐specific knowledge, perceptual processes, and linguistic universals. (shrink)

The theory of psychosis and autism as diametrical disorders offers a tractable and testable view of normal and abnormal human cognitive variation as a function of opposing traits grouped by their selection for maternal and paternal reproductive fitness. The theory could be usefully rooted and developed with reference to the lower-level perceptual and attentional phenomena from which social cognitive modules are developmentally refined.

We tested the hypothesis that our ability to detect fine kinematics variations is tuned to reveal more subtle differences when the motion pattern belongs to the observer compared to another individual. To this purpose, we analyzed the responses of 15 subjects in a same-different task on pairs of movements, which could belong to one or two different subjects. Self vs. Other comparisons were obtained by presenting both the observer’s and another participant’s kinematics. Subjects responded faster and more accurately when they (...) observed their own gestures compared to movements of another participant. In the latter case, slight kinematic differences were more likely to remain undetected. These findings are discussed within an ecological framework: in observing others, we are more concerned with detection of goals and intentions, i.e., outstanding variations in motion patterns. Conversely, in self-observation detection of more subtle differences is required to facilitate learning and optimization of motor acts. (shrink)

There is a growing consensus that the mental lexicon contains both abstract and word-specific acoustic information. To investigate their relative importance for word recognition, we tested to what extent perceptual learning is word specific or generalizable to other words. In an exposure phase, participants were divided into two groups; each group was semantically biased to interpret an ambiguous Mandarin tone contour as either tone1 or tone2. In a subsequent test phase, the perception of ambiguous contours was dependent on the (...) exposure phase: Participants who heard ambiguous contours as tone1 during exposure were more likely to perceive ambiguous contours as tone1 than participants who heard ambiguous contours as tone2 during exposure. This learning effect was only slightly larger for previously encountered than for not previously encountered words. The results speak for an architecture with prelexical analysis of phonological categories to achieve both lexical access and episodic storage of exemplars. (shrink)

Reid declared Hume's appeal to variation in the magnitude of a table with distance to be the best argument that had ever been offered for the ‘ideal hypothesis’ that we experience nothing but our own mental states. Reid's principal objection to this argument fails to apply to minimally visible points. He did establish that we have reason to take our perceptions to be caused by external objects. But his case that we directly perceive external objects is undermined by what (...) Hume had to say about the role played by color in our perception of the primary qualities of bodies. (shrink)

Data about perceptual variation motivate the ecumenicist view that distinct color representations are mutually compatible. On the other hand, data about agreement and disagreement motivate making distinct color representations mutually incompatible. Prima facie, these desiderata appear to conflict. I’ll lay out and assess two strategies for managing the conflict—color relationalism, and the self-locating property theory of color—with the aim of deciding how best to have your cake and eat it, too.